Page 104 of Unlocked

"Stay back." Her voice was high and tight. "Stay back or I'll shoot."

"You won't," Archer said. Not a challenge. A statement.

"I will. I swear I will."

"No," he said gently. "You won't. Because you're not a killer, Daniela. What happened in that dining room…that wasn't you. Someone told you to do it, and you did it because you were frightened, or you needed something, or they offered you something and it seemed worth it. And now you're standing here realizing it wasn't."

Her eyes were wet. The gun was still up, but her arms were trembling with the effort of holding it.

Ryker and Rush were positioned on either side of Archer, still and patient and ready. Archer kept his eyes on Daniela.

"Who sent you?" he asked.

She shook her head. "I can't tell you that."

"You can," he said. "I can help you. Whatever they told you about what happens if you talk to me, I promise you my resources are considerably larger than theirs, and I will use every single one of them to keep you safe."

"You don't know who they are."

"I have a good idea," he said. "I just need you to confirm it."

"You don't know," she said again, and the certainty in her voice was the most frightening thing. "You think you do. You don't."

"Then tell me," Archer said. "Help me understand."

She was crying now, tears running silently down her face, the gun still up. She looked desperately young. She looked like someone who had made a decision at some point that had seemed survivable and had discovered too late that it wasn't.

"They'll kill my family," she said. "My mother. My sister. They said if I talked to anyone, they'd know. They'd know within the hour. I…I took their money. To tell them things. I took the money. I wanted to start a life with my fiancé. I needed money to do it. Now they own me."

"I can protect your family," Archer said. "Right now. I can have people with them almost immediately. You have my word."

Something moved across her face. Hope, maybe, or the ghost of it. She looked at him, and he could see her considering it, weighing it, wanting to believe it.

"Daniela," he said quietly. "Put the gun down. Tell me who sent you. Let me help you."

The trembling in her arms got worse, and she blinked rapidly, as if trying to clear the tears.

"I'm sorry," she whispered.

He saw it before he could stop it. The shift in her eyes. Her decision made. The gun turning.

"No—"

The sound was small. Much smaller than the one that had killed Vincent Kelly. Barely more than a crack in the silence of the ambulance bay.

Daniela slid down the door and didn't move again.

The silence that followed was complete and absolute.

Archer stood in it for a long moment. Ryker swore quietly beside him. Rush turned away.

Archer looked at the gun on the floor and at the young woman who had been on his staff for two years and had been someone's instrument right up until the moment she'd decided to be nobody's.

He crouched down. He didn't touch anything. He just looked at her face, which was young and still and completely without the terror that had been in it thirty seconds ago.

What a waste.

What an absolute criminal waste.